LaTeX2e tricks

These tricks work in LaTeX2e documents, very few of them will
work in an old-style LaTeX 2.09 document. At sites where LaTeX 2.09
documents are translated by LaTeX2e in compatibility mode (this is the
case here at CAMP) some tricks
may work, but other people may be unable to use your document if they
have an older LaTeX installations. You have been warned!

LaTeX normally inserts extra space between each
item in the bibliography. A quick but ugly way of removing this space
is by setting \itemsep to -2mm (experiment to find the
right length) inside the thebibliography environment:

\begin{thebibliography}\setlength{\itemsep}{-2mm}

This is not practical if bibTeX is used, as the
thebibliography environment will be in the
.bbl file, which is overwritten each time bibTeX is run.
A better solution is a redefinition of thebibliography.
I have cut out and modified the original definition, just include the
bibspacing.sty package to
set the spacing to zero.
Another spacing may be selected by setting the
\bibspacing length. To set the spacing to one line, use:

\usepackage{bibspacing}
\setlength{\bibspacing}{\baselineskip}

NOTE: If you use the natbib package, you should
use natbibspacing.sty
instead, and be sure to load it
after natbib:

The standard listmaking environments are defined as special versions
of the list environment. The list
environment contains a large number of adjustable parameters, setting
the margins, spacing between items etc. etc. Some of these, such as
\itemsep can be set immediately after the
\begin command:

\begin{itemize}\addtolength{\itemsep}{-0.5\baselineskip}

Others, such as \topsep, cannot be adjusted in this way
as it is used inside the \begin statement. Anyway, in
the spirit of LaTeX these spacings should be adjustable in a global
way.

Solution: The
tweaklist.sty package redefines
the itemize, enumerate and
description packages, so that all parameters can be
adjusted. This was done by copying the original definitions, and
adding "hook commands" that are executed when entering the
environment. The hook commands are initially empty, but can be
redefined with \renewcommand.

Example: to set \topsep and \itemsep to 0 in
the enumerate environment, use:

The following hook commands are defined: enumhook for the
enumerate environment, itemhook for the
itemize environment, and descripthook for
the description environment.

LaTeX keeps track of nested enumerate and itemize environments. If
you only want to modify a specific nesting level, you should not use
enumhook or itemhook. Special hooks are
defined that are only called at the specific level. For the
enumerate environment they are enumhooki,
enumhookii, enumhookiii, and
enumhookiv. For the itemize environment
they are itemhooki, itemhookii,
itemhookiii, and itemhookiv. The
level-specific hooks are called after the global hook, so they can
redefine a setting in the global hook. As LaTeX does
not keep track of the nesting level of description
environments, there are no level-specific hooks for that
environment.

For a list of which parameters you can change, see the section on
lists in a LaTeX book. Suggestions:

Often you want figure captions in a different font than the main text
(for example slightly smaller, or in italics). Adding
e.g. \small in the beginning of each
\captionalmost works, but there are a few
problems.

The label (Figure 27:) is not affected by the font changing
command. This may be fine in some cases, but will look a bit strange
if the font size is changed.

If you use a list of figures, the font change command will be included
in it, unless the optional argument to \caption is used
to make a different (shorter) caption for the list of figures.

You may want a way to set the font globally, so it is easy to change
(and so you don't forget the font command in figure 27).

Fortunately, you don't have to understand it to use it! Change the
first line to choose another font change. NOTE: I cannot get
this to work with new-style font commands, so use the old style in the
\captionfont definition, i.e. use \em instead of
\emph.

LaTeX's figure placement algorithm is quite biased in favor of putting
figures on a page by themselves, instead of on the top of a page with
some text below it. Often, I find the result esthetically unappealing
(to be polite). Fortunately, the parameters of the algorithm can be
changed. The main problem is that LaTeX per default only allows a
part of the top of a text-page (70%) to contain figures, and
requires at least 20% of a page to be text when text and figures
share a page. These parameters should be set to more reasonable values,
for example 85% and 10%.

\renewcommand{\topfraction}{0.85}
\renewcommand{\textfraction}{0.1}

This helps, but sometimes LaTeX puts a figure on a page by itself,
although it would fit perfectly well on the top of a page. This
happens when the figure will not fit on the page where it was
defined. LaTeX then attempts to put it on a figures-only page
before it attempts to put it at the top of the next page. A
page may contain figures alone if the figure(s) use at least half the
page. To prevent half-empty pages this limit should probably be
increased to around 75%.

\renewcommand{\floatpagefraction}{0.75}

Be careful not to make \floatpagefraction larger than
\topfraction, then you risk to produce a figure that can
neither go on the top of a text page, nor on a page by itself. If
that happens, the figure and all later figures will be
postponed until next time a \clearpage is executed
(typically at the end of a chapter or the end of the document). This
will also happen if a figure is too large to fit on a page.

Normally the caption goes below or above the figure, but you may want
it to the left or the right instead. The minipage
environment is useful. The following example puts the figure on the
left side using 58% of the with, and the caption on the rigth using
38% of the with. The remaining 4% of the page width ends up
separating the two due to the \hfill command.

Including PostScript graphics can be done in many ways, and there are
many pitfalls. The following systematic way usually works, it is
based on the \epsfig command, which calls
\includegraphics. You may prefer to use
\includegraphics directly, or to use the
\epsf package, it is a matter of taste.

Include the package: \usepackage{epsfig}

The PostScript picture should contain a well formed bounding box
comment indicating where on the paper the figure appears if it is
printed, so LaTeX can calculate how to scale and move it to fit where
you want it. Many programs produce figures with wrong bounding
boxes.
The bbox command can calculate the bounding
box, it works in 95% of the cases. You can also measure it yourself
by printing it or using ghostview
(preferred). The bounding box command is in the beginning of the file
and looks like this:

%%BoundingBox: 0 10 612 792

this means that the figure fits inside a rectangle with lower left
corner at (0,10) and upper right corner (612,792). The unit is 1/72
inches (.3528 mm) measured from the lower left corner of the paper.
Ghostview shows the coordinates of the cursor in the upper left
corner, it makes it easy to measure bounding boxes.
If the bounding box comment is incorrect, fix it or use the
bb= argument to \epsfig.

Include the figure where you want it using a command like

\epsfig{file=graph.ps, angle=-90, width=\linewidth}

this command includes the figure in graph.ps, rotates it 90 degrees
clockwise (good for Xmgr graphs) and scales it to the current line
width. LaTeX automatically reserves space for the figure

Useful arguments to \epsfig:

bb=0 10 612 792 Override the bounding box comment in the
file.

clip= Clip anything in the file outside the bounding box.
Particularly useful if the figure contains a white background that
otherwise will overwrite some text. Note that the '=' should be there
although nothing follows it.

angle=45 Rotate the figure 45 degrees anticlockwise.

width=5cm Scale the figure so it becomes 5cm wide. Often
it is useful to give the length as a fraction of the linewidth,
e.g. width=0.5\linewidth

totalheight=3cm Scale the figure so it becomes 3cm high.

The order of arguments is important, the actions are performed in the
order specified, so if you scale to a specific width and then rotate,
you have in effect scaled to a specific height!

Note when rotating figures: In TeX a box has three dimensions: width,
height and depth. Height is how much it goes above the baseline,
depth how much it goes below. Epsfig rotates around the lower left
corner, so if you rotate by -90 degrees the entire figure ends up
below the baseline, i.e. the height is zero but it has a depth. For
this reason the height= will not work, but
totalheight= does. You may want to use
\raisebox to move it above the line.

Examples:

Including an Xmgr graph: The bounding box is normally wrong, use
bbox to measure it and fix it.

\epsfig{file=graph.ps, angle=-90, width=0.7\linewidth}

Including an ARTview figure: The bounding box is often too big,
as it includes the size of the white background (Note: It is
technically correct to include the background, but not practical when
including in LaTeX). Measure the dimension with bbox.

\epsfig{file=a0000.ps, bb=48 62 505 486, clip=, width=8cm}

The clip= is necessary to prevent the white background
from causing trouble.

When TeX splits your text into lines it tries to do it the "least
ugly" way, by assigning penalties to things that don't look nice (such
as words split over two lines). The penalty for splitting a word is
rather low, so you may want to increase it when writing texts where
split words look bad (in particular posters and viewgraphs). This
will produce lines with a little more extra spacing between words, and
you should therefore increase TeX's tolerance for such lines. I have
found the following values to be useful (put it in the preamble).

\hyphenpenalty=5000
\tolerance=1000

You may have to experiment a bit (adjusting \tolerance
appears to be most promising). A \hyphenpenalty of 10000
(almost) prevents hyphenation, but produces overlong and/or ugly lines.

The archive of comp.text.tex on
DejaNews. Comp.text.tex is a NetNews
discussion group where people discuss TeX/LaTeX. It is highly
probable that someone already discussed your problem, so you can find
the solution in DejaNews' database. Go to
DejaNews, select Power Search,
write comp.text.tex in the Forum field and some keyword(s) in the
Find field. Press Find. Good luck....

If you are really desperate, you may try to post you
question on comp.text.tex, maybe
somebody somewhere in the world will be nice and answer after a few
days. Or maybe you'll just be added to a lot of junk email lists :-(